Famous Fliers in a Whirlwind Race

By

Daniel Ford

May 25, 2012 3:00 p.m. ET

Charles Lindbergh was at one time the greatest and most handsome of American heroes, but he comes down to us today as a somewhat chilly figure. Photographs almost never show him with a smile on his face, and his later troubles and relative obscurity seem to cast a shadow over his bright beginnings. It could be said that Lindbergh was cursed by his own accomplishment, which was to set out from Long Island on May 20, 1927, in a small plane and land safely at Le Bourget Field near Paris after 33 hours, 29 minutes and 30 seconds alone in the air. At age 25, he became the first international celebrity, trailed by flocks of pressmen and admirers until his glamour faded and his troubles began.

With "Atlantic Fever," Joe Jackson has set forth on a well-trodden path—that of the many chroniclers who have tried to recapture Lindbergh's moment of glory. It is a path so well-trodden that a 1972 book, by Edward Jablonski, has the identical title and a similar brief: tracking the race that Lindbergh won. Even so, Mr. Jackson has acquitted himself well, by focusing not so much on Lindbergh as on the other airmen who tried to become the first solo flier across the Atlantic. Most of them were better financed than Lindbergh, more experienced in long-distance flight and in some cases more likable.

Atlantic Fever

By Joe Jackson

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 525 pages, $30

Chief among them was Richard Byrd, supposedly the first man to take an airplane to the North Pole and later the leading Antarctic explorer of the 1930s. Adm. Byrd was a manipulator of men and data, and he may even have been something of a fraud. (Did he really reach the North Pole in his Fokker tri-motor in 1926? It seems unlikely.) But he was the most generous of men, freely distributing his private weather forecasts to all the prospective Atlantic fliers and in 1927 lending Roosevelt Field—which he had leased for his own private use—to Lindbergh to ensure a safe takeoff for Paris. Mr. Jackson makes the case that Byrd failed to get in the air ahead of Lindbergh through an excess of caution, endlessly monitoring the weather and calibrating his aircraft, crew and equipment.

Then there were the French. The Atlantic crossing was a matter of national pride in a country that had leapt ahead of the United States during World War I as a builder of planes and an incubator of pilots. The wind, alas, was against them. Blowing as it commonly did from west to east, it would tend to slow a westbound pilot while boosting an American one.

Very likely the Frenchmen Charles Nungesser—"famous, glamorous, and adored"—and François Coli did manage to beat Lindbergh across the Atlantic. Alas, they never reached New York, probably crashing toward the end of their journey in Newfoundland or in the wilds of Maine. (After their takeoff in early May 1927, their plane was glimpsed but its wreckage never found.) Another Frenchman, René Fonck, opted for the safer route, joining his American rivals in New York for an eastbound flight. He was France's "ace of aces" as a fighter pilot in World War I, though regarded as a showboater by his comrades. In any event, his Atlantic bid ended in a fiery crash upon takeoff—a fate that too often visited fliers in the 1920s when their tube-and-fabric aircraft lifted off from turf runways while overloaded with aviation gasoline.

There were many other competitors, but Mr. Jackson has the most fun with Douglas "Wrong Way" Corrigan, an Irishman with a daredevil streak. Corrigan was one of the California technicians who built Lindbergh's plane, the Spirit of St. Louis. Ten years later, he crossed the United States in a single-engine craft with a leaky gas tank, going from Long Beach, Calif., to Brooklyn, N.Y. Rather than fly back where he came from, as he was scheduled to do, he took off the "wrong way," heading across the Atlantic. He maintained to the end of his life that it was all an accident. Why, he only followed the wrong end of the compass! Flying in clouds, he didn't realize his mistake until he saw the green fields of Ireland and became the first man to fly solo from New York to Dublin.

"It was amazing," Mr. Jackson writes of his cast of characters, "how quickly and dramatically so many of them fell." The gallant Francesco de Pinedo, attempting an Atlantic round robin, ran out of fuel and had to be towed to the Azores by a fishing boat, causing the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini to banish him to a minor diplomatic post in Buenos Aires. (De Pinedo later died in another trans-Atlantic attempt.) René Fonck, similarly humiliated by his failure, left the French air service to become a silent monk.

But Mr. Jackson is thinking primarily of Lindbergh, who became a recluse after his son was murdered in 1932 and who was regarded as a too-avid pro-German isolationist in the years leading up to World War II. The author stresses the dark side of Lindbergh's character—his loathing of the press and eventually the public—as if to persuade us that, for a brave daredevil, it might be better to die trying rather than succeed and have the world turn against him.

It is curious, then, that Mr. Jackson omits the strangest turn of Lindbergh's life. From 1957 until his death in 1974, this once-famous man, with a devoted family, seems to have maintained a ménage à quatre in Germany and Switzerland, fathering perhaps seven children by three women, two of them sisters. It was as if he wanted to thumb his nose at the journalists who had made his life a misery and to prove—to himself if no one else—that he did indeed have a heart.

—Mr. Ford is publishing "Poland's Daughter," the story of an exile in the Soviet Union and Middle East during World War II, in serial form for the Kindle e-book reader.

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